of course, i care very much as someone who has worked on these kinds of cases and done a lot in the area of human trafficking and sex trafficking. from what i have learned with the "miami herald" reporting and other so that was strange. the other thing that was strange is the victims were not even told about the sentence. in my state you have all kinds of requirements. you don't seal an agreement like this in nearly any case because you want to consult with the victims because you put the sentence out there. it's law in most cases. so i think there is a very good reason to figure out what went on here and why the u.s. attorney at the time, and this was back during the last bush

administration in 2007, george w. bush, why this happened. and i think it's a meritorious review, and i think senator ben sass and others agree we should look into this. >> senator amy klobuchar, one of the most pragmatic senators in the u.s. congress. >> common ground is the only way you can get to higher ground. except the george h.w. bush funeral we did it for two hours and that was good. >> when you make a decision let me know. now it's time for the "last word" with lawrence o'donnell. lawrence, i'm sorry i ate a minute. >> i wanted you to use that because we're going to talk about jeffrey epstein's case later in this hour.

so her take on it was very important for everyone to hear. i saw senator klobuchar in the hallway down stairs before she went on your program, and so i asked her one question. and it was this. it was a very simple question. i just wanted a number. i just wanted to know if she could give me a number of democrats who will run for president, and she couldn't. she tried her best but she couldn't narrow it down within say 20 or so. >> what's your best guess, lawrence? >> i think the number might begin with a 2. i don't know. i do not know. that's why i asked amy klobuchar. >> she just said she agrees with you. i will say the really good news about this is when it comes to building the debate sets it's going to be lots of union jobs building stadium seat podiums for everyone who wants to get in on all those tears. >> good night senator globe char and good night, rachel. they're really there. there, there, finally. we have two panicked control rooms with that. thank you very much. well, we have breaking news

tonight. nbc news is reporting that president trump's lawyers have resumed discussions with special prosecutor robert mueller in recent days. the first time that has been acknowledged since the president submitted written responses to questions regarding the possibility of collusion between his 2016 campaign and russia. that's according to two people familiar with the matter. the individuals would not characterize the nature of the discussions. so what would the president's lawyers be talking to robert mueller about now? does robert mueller have follow-up questions to president trump's written answers to mueller's written questions. or does robert mueller now want subpoena the president to

testify under oath to a grand jury? there could be several other reasons why the special prosecutor's office is in new discussions with the president's lawyers. the atlantic is reporting tonight that the president's lawyers and the white house actually have no organized plan for responding to any report robert mueller might issue on his investigation. in the past donald trump's tv lawyer rudy giuliani has repeatedly said that they are working on a point by point rebuttal of whatever it is robert mueller is going to come up with. giuliani has called what they are working on or supposed to be working on a counter report to the mueller report. but now the atlantic elena plott is reporting according to a half-dozen current and former white house officials, the administration has no plans in place for responding to the special counsel's findings save for expecting a twitter spree. the atlantic report that some in the white house believe preparing an organized response is pointless because the president is incapable of, quote, making plans and sticking to them.

the article says, we would always -- someone in the article says we would always put together plans with the knowledge that he wouldn't use them or they'd go off the rails. one recently departed official told me. and at this point with mueller they've decided they're not even going to do that. it's like jesus, take the wheel, the source added, but scarier. rudy giuliani told the atlantic, quote, i don't think there's anyone in the world that can stop donald trump from tweeting. giuliani said, i've tried. giuliani told the atlantic that the special prosecutor's treatment of paul manafort really upsets the president. when trump learned that the former campaign chairman was in solitary confinement giuliani said he said to me, don't they realize we're america? never in the history of the presidency has a lawyer working for the president ever done more damage to that president than rudy giuliani does every time -- every time he talks about the president.

in the atlantic rudy giuliani actually said this about answering the written questions that robert mueller put to the president of the united states. answering those questions was a nightmare. it took him about three weeks to do what would normally take two days. giuliani said the reason the president took so long to answer the questions included numerous distractions. quote, giuliani recalled one instance when they were working on the list and chief of staff

john kelly broke in to talk about the caravan. tonight at this hour we already know we will be talking about significant developments in the special prosecutor's investigation, which means we might be dealing with an avalanche of angry trump tweets about the investigation. tomorrow is the deadline for robert mueller's team to submit to federal courts in washington, d.c. a document spelling out how president trump's former campaign chairman, paul manafort, allegedly violated his plea agreement and committed crimes while he was supposed to be cooperating with the special prosecutor. also tomorrow, a federal judge in new york city has ordered that federal prosecutors in new york and the special prosecutors office have until 5:00 p.m. to deliver sentencing memos that will describe in more detail donald trump's former lawyer, michael cohen's, cooperation in the ongoing investigations. leading off our discussion now, lynn kershnere, michelle sunshine. i want to go to rudy giuliani saying, no, there's no plan how to respond after he's told us, oh, we're working on it and we're writing up the counter report to the mueller report. and now it's just, well, no one can control him and no one can control the tweets. >> i also wonder how much rudy giuliani knows the truth about what donald trump did during the election. people who related him in the past have said that they always met with him in pairs so that they would have a record of what he said. in given donald trump's

people who related him in the past have said that they always met with him in pairs so that they would have a record of what he said. in given donald trump's sensitivity on this and also i think is probably incredibly sensitive about the degree to which he's been compromised by his financial entitlements with russia, i would be really surprised if he actually confided all of that to somebody who could then go about and prepare a rebuttal or an explanation. it seems to me they're just sort of at the mercy of mueller's revelations. >> we need some theories from

you about what the special prosecutor and the president's lawyers would be talking about now. >> you know, lawrence, in all the years i was a criminal prosecutor i can tell you that there is one tried and true defense tactic. when the evidence is overwhelming and there is no way to escape the guilt of the defendant, what the defense team will do is they will attack the fbi agents and attack the prosecutors. i would be shocked if we saw any sort of rebuttal from the president's defense team that included a point by point refuitation of the evidence mueller finds. what you're going to see the this scorched earth angry reply attacking the fbi agents, attacking the, you know, angry democrats that make up bob mueller's team. so i don't think we're going to see a thoughtful academic evidence based rebuttal. i think we're going to see yelling and screaming and tweeting and attacks on mueller and his team. >> glenn, let me just go back to that first breaking news item tonight from nbc news saying that the special prosecutor's office is in some kind of negotiation or discussion with the president's lawyers. what would that be about at this

point? would that be follow-up on the written answers? >> glenn, let me just go back to that first breaking news item tonight from nbc news saying that the special prosecutor's office is in some kind of negotiation or discussion with the president's lawyers. what would that be about at this point? would that be follow-up on the written answers? at this stage what do you suspect that might be? >> so lawrence, what i strongly suspect, i'll tell you i never did interviews in writing as a prosecutor of witnesses, of suspects, of targets. so i suspect what happens is the president's answers that were given to the special counsel are probably so full of caveats and qualifications that they are largely meaningless. so it doesn't surprise me that the mueller team may be going back to the president's defense team and saying, listen, based on the answers you gave we have

many follow-up questions because we actually need to nail some things down, and we need to understand what representations you're actually making in your reply. so this doesn't surprise me because i have a feeling they didn't get straight answers from the president's team the first time around. >> sam stein, there's the president's lawyer telling the world that should have taken a couple of days took three weeks because of donald trump's attention span. >> yeah, when we talk to rudy at the daily beast he made the point it was very difficult to find time to answer these questions in part because of all the things that were on the president's docket. as we know from the publicly released schedules and also as you can divine from the rapidity of the tweets, the president does have a lot of free time.

he's not packing his schedule deep. in what in actuality probably happened is they were being careful, one might say loyally with the phrasing of their responses. there's deep legal jeopardy that can come out of this, in part because there's been numerous and conflicting statements already issued by trump and his lawyers how they've handled this episode. i'm sure they're being extremely delicate with this. if i may, the rebuttal report we also talked about with mueller as well. by that they meant the backgrounds and associations of mueller's team, comments from them in the past. so this is a rebuttal report that's already largely been put together. that's how sort of ridiculous this whole thing is. >> and michelle, there are reports tonight indicating there are republicans in congress who are asking the white house for

information so that they will be ready to respond and defend the president, and they're getting nothing from the white house. >> well, they're not going -- of course they're getting nothing. what could the president possibly give them? and mean so much -- we already know about a huge amount of criminality, obstruction kind of collusion that's right out in the open. we can only assume that what is hidden is, you know, kind of the iceberg under the sea. they're going to find out all sorts of things tomorrow about manafort, you know, possibly about what michael cohen has been telling prosecutors not just about donald trump's campaign and his business but his corrupt foundation. so donald trump is not going to go to congress and say here are a list of all the things i've

done wrong that are about to be in the news. >> glenn, what do we expect tomorrow in the documents we're going to see in court, in washington and new york? >> well, we're hoping that they're going to be enlightening but i think we've learned a bit of a lesson from the flynn memo which was so highly redacted, and that's an indication that mueller's investigation is not necessarily near the end game. it's an ongoing investigation and prosecutors are careful to redact out and keep from public view anything that could compromise the ongoing investigation. i do think because mueller sort of promised in the last filing in the manafort case that he would inform the court how manafort lied, on what topics he lied, and how it is that the special counsel can prove that he's lying. now, he promised that to the court but i don't think we can assume that those answers to the court will necessarily be unredacted. i think we're hopeful that they

are. but if they deal with the central question of russian collusion, then we may see a memo that is not unlike the flynn memo, highly redacted. i think with respect to the cohen memos, we're probably going to get a good bit of public information about the nature, the extent and the value of michael cohen's cooperation with both the special counsel and the prosecutors up in the southern district of new york. >> but, sam, even with the redactions we saw in the documents, the scope of the investigation you could get a feel for and you could see that michael flynn is involved in more than one investigation that's going on there. and so you could talk about the flynn documents either way. you could talk about how much they were redacted or how much you could actually see what's going on in those documents. >> right, there's a certain amount of bread crumbs in these documents. whether they all fit together or larger meanings is a question. but you can read into them with the redactions. i think tomorrow we'll have a senls of that primarily of what we get in the manafort situation which is what was he lying about?

i think at a minimum we will get an answer from the mueller team about why they said he had been lying after agreeing to this plea deal. and they have to at least explain on what matters. i think there's a hipt of what matters and that could tell us a variety of things. one it could be a complete dud to the russia investigation. it could be simply about manafort's work in ukraine and talking to trump. but simultaneously it could very well be about his time during his campaign at which point that blows things up to an entirely different level. even though we don't know when the conclusion of the mueller investigation is coming, this week has been rather phenomenal. because we've three different people in extreme close orbit to donald trump all entrenched in this legal drama. it's a really remarkable week, and i don't think we've ever witnessed anything like this with regards to the presidency before. >> we're all going going to have

gather here tomorrow night. thank you for leading us off tonight. >> and when we come back, today was still election day in america as the democrats in their house races officially secured their 40th pickup just today. >> also today, some senate republicans continued to take a stand and actually stands -- multiple stands on different issues against the president. we were talking about the model t. now here we are talking about winning the most jd power iqs and appeal awards. talking about driver-assist technology talking about cars that talk and listen. talking about the highest customer loyalty in the country. but that's enough talking. seriously. that was a lot of talking.

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some republican senators are finally standing up to president trump. republican senators are breaking with the president in his defense of saudi arabia after the saudi assassination of journalist jamal khashoggi. republican senator bob corker, the chairman of the senate foreign relations committee announced today that the senate is taking further steps to punish saudi arabia for the murder of that journalist. in addition to a resolution yesterday condemning the crown prince for ordering the murder. senators are working on two new measures, one that would suspend of the sales of weapons to saudi arabia and impose sanctions, and another that would pull back u.s. military support for the war in yemen.

and today the senate judiciary committee's confirmation process came to a grinding halt again because republican senator jeff flake is refusing to vote for any judicial confirmations in the judiciary committee until the senate votes on his bipartisan bill to protect special prosecutor robert mueller from being fired by the president. >> i still encourage the majority leader to bring this to a vote. we need to protect special counsel. the message that needs to be sent to the white house is we do not have the president's back if he fires the special counsel. i do think there are a number of judges that we should be approving.

there are a number of them that are not controversial that are being held up, unfortunately, but this has to be priority. you have to take a stand. >> senator flake's stand has forced senate judiciary committee chuck grassly to cancel confirmation hearings today for federal judges. and nebraska republican senator ben sass is pressing for more information on donald trump's labor secretary, alexander acosta. he wants to know why he gave a lenient deal to a defendant who traveled underage girls in florida. the defendant was jeffrey epstein who was defended in his sex trafficking case by attorney allen dershowitz who has been accused in the case by one of the girls. i am particularly disturbed by this reporting indicating that federal prosecutors went out of their way to arrange this sweetheart deal for epstein and conseal it from the women and girls that he abused that could have objected to it in an apparent violation of federal law. joining us now david jolly and michelle goldberg is still with us. michelle, i want to start with the epstein case, which is

really the acosta case. relevant now in the senate because acosta is a member of the cabinet. and there's a question of can he continue to be. and so far it seems he's been a bit protected just by the amount of other news that's flooding the zone in washington. >> right, he's really fortunate to work for an administration hat husband so many large scandals that what would be a multi-day kind of headline grabbing story in a normal administration sort of fades into the background. i mean this is such a shocking story, and his role in it is really an inexplicable absence. just his handling of the case makes no sense in terms of his background, as somebody who actually had a reputation for somebody who cared quite a bit about sex trafficking. the whole thing is just completely bizarre, and he's never really come up with a satisfactory explanation on why epstein had this deal. one of the kind of incredible

things about this deal is it didn't just protect epstein. it gave immunity to unnamed possible coconspirators, other people who were, you know, part of this kind of sex trafficking circle. and we really, really need to know who those people are. >> yeah, and david jolly, the extraordinary thing is that it has definitely prevented any possibility of acosta becoming the next attorney general, which is one of the things people were wondering about. but the question is can you maintain a position in the trump cabinet with this set of allegations against you? >> if jeffrey epstein was the next nominee for the supreme

court, ben sass and every republican would vote to convict mim. i'm not convinced we are seeing this overwhelming wave of political convictions. the reality is as i mentioned they will look the other way as they need to support this president when it comes to his cabinet picks. jeff flake, though, he is due credit for standing tall and saying we need a vote on the mueller resolution. he had to chance to do that before, he did not. he's likely running for president. the people who are standing up on the khashoggi matter, lindsey graham, bob corker and others, those are not issues that will play in 2020. and frankly when 2020 comes around the likes of lindsey graham will run right back to the embrace of donald trump. it's hard in this environment when we see people stand with some type of principle. but i think what we've learned in the past two years we simply can't trust that among republican leaders today. >> we have seen cabinet members forced to depart because they were using private planes too much, i mean much milder stuff compared to what we're talking about here with acosta. >> right. i mean, my sense is whether or not he has to depart is going to have nothing to do with the

actual gravity of the charge as opposed to how much media oxygen it ends up sucking up and to the extent trump has to watch people talking about it on cable television. i mean, i can't imagine for a second that he's bothered by the underlying charge. if there's one thing donald trump believes in is that, you know, rich men are entitled to special consideration with the justice system. >> yeah, and david, donald trump himself has spoken positively about epstein, saying he knew him and he knew that he liked younger women. and donald trump publicly talked about that, thought that was perfectly okay. but if donald trump himself gets enough shouted questions on his way to the helicopter about acosta, could that tip it? >> in a normal environment, yes. but everything we have seen from this president is this exactly

the culture he defends. it's the culture he refuses to acknowledge. it's the culture he doubles down on and he sends frankly the women in his administration out to defend him. kellyanne conway, sarah sanders, they will be out defending the president, defending secretary acosta and they will say that the justice system worked its course. in fact i think we even heard last week, look, any time you get a guilty plea that's success. the talking points will be there. look, lawrence, i think you and the rest of the country and myself included we hope we would get something different from the president. but if history is any judge this president will double down. >> michelle, bob corker and jeff flake have just days left on the job as united states senators. so does the republicans and trump just have to wait until january? >> right and hopefully maybe some push back from mitt romney. but, yes, i think they're going to be able to start industrial scale confirmations of judges again. although i do wonder if there's small chinks in republican support for donald trump. not out of conviction but simply

because he's been diminished. he's been revealed as a far weaker figure. there was a time in which he seemed much more of a savant. he might be crude and ignorant but it seemed as if the economy was doing well, the stock market was doing well, we hadn't seen this incredible rebuke in the mid-terms. now you can see the tangible failure of everything he's purported to do. you see the stock market in chaos, looming signs of recession, the trade deficit, which is not necessarily an important metric of economic health, but one the president talks about a lot. the trade deficit is at record

levels. you know, the debt is going to be at record levels. and so i think it's becoming clear i think he doesn't have some magic formula. he's just a con man and the con is becoming more and more obvious to, you know, not enough people but more people. >> yeah. and david, how wrong am i -- this is how i will begin this question. how wrong am i to think that there are republican senators who are watching what happened to the house of representatives and realizing that they are in a very similar posture now since they're going to have to defend so many more seats two years from now. democrats are going to have a real structural advantage in this election coming up two years from now in the senate. and some republican senators might decide it's time to peel away from the president now to try to avoid a disaster for republican senators in the next election. >> sure. the republican senator or

republican candidate that figures out that equation will be the first one to do so. the reality is there is no measure of past performance of somebody, a republican that found a way to split from the president and still win. i think to the point we were talking about, there may be some cracks in the armor but the reality is until november 3rd, 2020, every republican will stay with donald trump. and on november 4th, 2020 they'll all be gone. but we've not seen a republican able to distance themselves from trump and still win. and when we come back, tariff man has set a record. michelle was just mentioning this. donald trump has now achieved a record high trade deficit with china. it is actually the highest trade deficit we have ever had with china. and it is thanks entirely to donald trump's trade policies with china, which is not exactly what he promised his voters in the presidential campaign. after walking six miles at an amusement park,

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trump enomics are closing in on donald trump in a way that would be really funny if it wasn't so mad for the united states of america. candidate donald trump lied his way to the presidency, and one of the big lies he told is what he would do as president about the national debt. >> we'll start reducing our debt and reducing it bigly, which i want to do. and we're going to knock it down and we're going do it bigly and quickly. we're going to stop our deficits. we're going to stop our

deficits. i'm really good at it. who's better at debt than i am? is there anybody? we're not going to be increasing our debt. >> he increased the debt by a lot. the debt has increased dramatically. donald trump has taken it from $19 trillion up to $21.7 trillion, and it's going up from there. the daily beast is reporting that president trump was shown projections of the national debt in his first year in office and he said he didn't care about it. and then there is the trade deficit, which is also now worse than ever after donald trump ran a presidential campaign promising to just eliminate our trade deficit with foreign countries. but tariff man as he now calls himself has now presided over what is now a record high trade deficit with china. and the highest overall trade deficit in ten years. the stock market apparently fell for donald trump's lie that he tweeted this weekend saying that

china has agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into china from the u.s. that would be a really big deal, but it was obviously untrue to any experienced reader of trump tweets. but wall street fell for it and assumed automobile manufacturers were on their way to opening up a vast new market in china and that pushed the stock market up by 300 points on monday, but when the president and officials had to walk back the big lie that president trump told china on automobile, tuesday the dow dropped 800 points and stocks went down today. quote, donald trump could be the first president since jimmy carter to run for re-election during a recession. so donald trump is going to have a lot to lie about in the next presidential campaign about the trade deficit increasing on his watch. how will he lie to his voters about the national det increasingly dramatically on his watch? will it be clear to even trump voters what a disaster tariff man has been for economic policy and for everything that donald trump promised as a presidential candidate? john harvard will join us when we come back after this break. a warning, you are about to hear the president of the united states tell a big lie. >> thanks to our powerful trade policies the trade deficit is

falling and falling and falling. >> joining our discussion now, john harwood, editor at large for cnbc, and bruce bartlett also the author of the book "the truth matters." ( ♪ ) what do you get the person that loves to tailgate? (click, beeps) ( ♪ ) how about a new tailgate? ring in the holidays with great deals across the buick lineup. use your avenir cash allowance

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a warning, you are about to hear the president of the united states tell a big lie. >> thanks to our powerful trade policies the trade deficit is falling and falling and falling. >> joining our discussion now,

john harwood, editor at large for cnbc, and bruce bartlett also the author of the book "the truth matters." john, the contradicts in reality now of what the president campaigned on are quite striking from the debt to the trade deficit, just across the board. you raised the possibility that he might be running for re-election during a recession. sketch that out for us. >> well, you know, lawrence, the president and his advisers have been boasting about the idea that while president obama never achieved 3% annual growth they were going to do that on a sustainable basis. in fact, during the campaign he said 4%. well, it appears now that growth is slowing. we have 4.2% in the second quarter, 3.5% in the third

quarter. but it's now slowing in the fourth, and the national association for business economics took a survey of forecasters and two thirds of them said they expect us to be in recession by 2020. the last president as you noted to be in that condition was jimmy carter, and it didn't end well for him. so the idea that a president who said the deficit was going to come down sees it going up, trade deficit go down, sees it going up. and if we're actually in a recession the props i think get knocked out from under the 40% popularity rating he has right now which is already historically weak. >> bruce bartlett, big surprise tariff man is wreaking havoc with the trade balance for the united states. >> yeah, this was easily predictable.

a lot of people don't realize that there's a relationship between the trade deficit and the budget deficit because we have to borrow more from foreigners. and when we borrow more from foreigners that comes through the accounting as a larger trade deficit. and by the way, trump didn't just say he was going to balance the budget. at one point he said he was going to literally pay off the national debt. >> yeah, he said he was going to eliminate it. and to that point, bruce, i'd like to say on this for a second because you worked for george h.w. bush, the important fact he represents tonight is he was the very last republican who believed and realized that to deal with the deficit and the debt you needed bipartisan compromise on deficit reduction. he entered into that compromise. he was condemned by a lot of republicans for doing it. he allowed very modest tax increases within a bill that had much larger amount of spending cuts than the tax increases. pushed the top income tax rate

from 28% up to 31%, which is dramatically lower where it stands tonight. but that was the kind of compromise that george h.w. bush was the very last republican president who was willing to do that. >> that's correct. george bush for all his faults, and he certainly had many, lived in the real world and he understood accounting and he didn't believe in phoney-baloney nonsense economics, that unfortunately his son and current president traffic in on a daily basis. he never thought tax cuts paid for themselves. he made that in retrospect, a wrong statement about read my lips because he had said back in 1980 that ronald reagan economic program was voodoo economics. and he paid for that very heavily and was defeated in 1992 for that reason. >> and lawrence, this is a precise illustration of the difference between the two men. president trump is somebody who

thinks about what's going to be good or bad for him in the next five to ten minutes. we saw a report in the last 24 hours that when he was shown signs that the deficit was going to be ballooning he said, well, i'm not going to be around then. george h.w. bush took the opposite approach. he broke his pledge. he accepted those tax increases in that spending deal. for all i know, lawrence, you might have been part of negotiating that deal. i'm not 100% sure, but he did not get credit for that. that was not something that produced gratification politically for him. the opposite. but that deal set the stage for combined with the bill clinton

deficit reduction deal, which had more tax increases for the economic boom and the budget surpluses of the late 1990s. that was delayed gratification. donald trump does the opposite. >> the footnote here is that i worked on the clinton deficit reduction package but not the bush deficit reduction package. thank you very much for joining us. if you follow john harwood and bruce bartlett on twitter, you will know everything i know about public finance and economics. coming up, when we come back, something you have never seen before on this program. coming up next. ♪ ♪ applebee's bigger bolder grill combos are back. now that's eatin good in the neighborhood.

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my name is tiffany and i'm 18 years old, now i have a chance at college, studying

particle science. >> i met tiffany two years ago when she was in when she was in school in malawi. tiffany was attending one of the best high schools in malawi, a boarding school where i also met joyce who recited a poem for us many of you might remember. joyce also came to the united states earlier this year and joined me here on the set in new york. i saw joyce again on my recent trip to malawi during thanksgiving week. joyce is still doing very well in high school thanks to the scholarship that you have helped provide with your generous contributions to the kind fund, the partnership i created for girls to attend high school in malawi where the girls graduation rate is much lower than the boys. for a variety of reasons it is much more difficult for girls to

get an education than boys. that's why we help the girls. tiffany was one of the girls able to stay in high school thanks to the scholarship your contributions provided. tiffany is the first of our scholarship girls who you are meeting in college. tiffany is living the dream. the dream that we had for girls like her when we started the scholarship program. she's made it all the way to college. tiffany almost had to drop out of high school because she couldn't pay her school fees. tiffany's mother died when she was a little girl, so she was brought up by her grandmother. rose nathenda, who worried about what was going to happen to tiffany when they couldn't pay for her high school. >> translator: she says that she was told by tiffany that she's going to come back home, she's going to leave school and come back home because she had no school fees. and they all sat here waiting for her to come back home. a few days later she called and said, no, i'm not coming home. my school fees have been taken care of.

that was when she got the scholarship. she said she didn't even know who the person was who was paying her fees, how it happened. >> you were paying her fees, and you can help more girls like tiffany finish high school at last word desk.msnbc.com, you can specify your contribution for desks or for girls scholarships and you can make a contribution to anyone on your holiday gift list and unicef will send them an acknowledgment of your gift. rose was forced to drop out of school in 4th grade, and she never expected her grandchildren to go to college. rose couldn't help her grandchildren with their

homework, but she came up with a unique plan to make sure that they worked hard on their homework. >> translator: she says she never anticipated that they would go to college, but she still used to make sure that they, they -- she was encouraging them to stay in school. she never used to make them do any chores at the house so they could concentrate on school. so she would cook food for them for both mike and tiffany and take it to them at school, so just to make sure they focused on their school. in case they would have said, oh, no, we failed the exams because you used to make us work at home, granny. >> when i visited tiffany at chancellor college, she got emotional when she talked about her grandmother. >> yes, she's very proud, very proud. she was planning on -- she has, she has great expectations. what are we doing graduation day and stuff. i feel like crying. can i -- >> i asked tiffany what it feels like now to be a role model for students back at her high school who are hoping to go to college.

>> it feels great. and they also motivate me. i feel like i can do better so that i can encourage them much better, much greater than just being a college student, go to work, and tell them that, here i am. >> uh-huh, yeah. do you think a lot of girls don't realize that this is possible if they work hard enough? >> um, yes, there are a lot of them out there. you know in malawi there is the issue of women not being able to do well at college. so most of them, they look down on themselves. they think they cannot do it. they think they don't deserve going to college. they just want to get married and move on life. >> tiffany is on her way thanks to her hard work in high school, and thanks to her grandmother who made her a dedicated

student. >> translator: what she does next to her future is in her hands. but right now she is working hard and she's making sure that she can finish school. ver chang. that's why this is the view for every other full-size pickup. and this year, it's déjà vu all over again 'cuz only the ford f-150 with its high strength, military-grade aluminum alloy body gives you best-in-class torque, best-in-class payload... and you got it, baby... best-in-class towing. still leading the pack. this is the big dog! this is the ford f-150. it doesn't just raise the bar, pal. it is the bar. ♪ applebee's bigger, bolder grill combos are back.

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time for tonight's last word. >> not everyone thinks that flynn's sentencing recommendation looks damning. take republican congressman and man who thinks he's talking on the phone right now. [ laughter ] mark meadows. meadows went on the fox news to say how this whole flynn thing

is actually great for trump. >> i think it's good news for president trump tonight that this is what it's come down to, even though they said he substantially cooperated. i think he substantially cooperated to say there was no collusion. >> yeah, you see? flynn spent all those hours telling mueller the many ways trump didn't collude. it's just 19 hours of redacted neo-nazis. -- redacted innocence. >> stephen colbert gets the last word. "the 11th hour" with brian williams starts now. >> tonight we are hours away from the mueller team revealing more. details on why manafort lied to the feds and specifics on the extent of michael cohen's cooperation with them. just as we learn tonight the trump and mueller teams are talking again. also hours from now, james comey heads back to the hill. house republicans want to grill him on the fbi while they still can before the democrats take over.

and what to make of the president's appearance and demeanor at the bush funeral. we'll ask the author of a book on donald trump about the one man among the five presidents who stood apart. as "the 11th hour" gets underway on a thursday night. well, good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. this was day 686 of the trump administration and we are now, as we said, hours away from another critical move from robert mueller and his team of federal prosecutors. put another way, by this time tomorrow, on this broadcast tomorrow night, we will likely be pouring over and discussing two documents in chief. one of them a sentencing memo for former trump personal lawyer michael cohen of new york who is now working for the feds. the other is a document that should explain why the feds have gone and shredded the cooperation agreement they had at one time with paul manafort, who now faces big jail time. we now noah corresponding to our friends at the "the new york times" the manafort team was telling the trump team what mueller investigators were most interested in and asking about. just days ago, the mueller team revealed michael flynn had been providing what they called substantial assistance in the russia inquiry. tonight our own kristen welker citing two sources is reporting that trump's lawyers have